


your children will come at you with knives

by Askance



Series: Terrible Things [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dubious Consent Due to Supernatural Influences, Exhibitionism, Homicidal Ideation, M/M, POV Second Person, Self-Harm, Slight underage, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-03
Updated: 2014-11-03
Packaged: 2018-02-23 21:39:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2556695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After slaughtering a vengeful coven of witches in Montana, John steals away his sons to a desolate motel in the frigid middle of nowhere, Washington State, worried that they've been followed. But it's not the safe haven he'd hoped for. Sam and Dean are feeling <i>strange</i>--detached, debauched, and violent. In such isolation, there's only really one place for that violence to go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your children will come at you with knives

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Sam/Dean Minibang over at [samdean_otp](http://samdean-otp.livejournal.com/). Full masterpost on my journal [here](http://steeplechasers.livejournal.com/34835.html).
> 
> Soundtrack for the fic [here.](http://8tracks.com/askeiel/your-children-will-come-at-you-with-knives)

This is the room where you live. This is the blank grey stone-cold room where you live while your father chases ghosts in the snow. Here is the bulging cobweb in the corner of the ceiling above the bathroom door: thick strands of dust, hanging, a dead curdled spider the size of your curled-up thumb still trapped in its strings.

 

“Put down those salt lines,” your father said, “put down those salt lines, something's been following us. Don't leave this room.” Then he left.

 

Here's the snow, on the windowsill, and it looks like salt, too. It's packed up so high in the corners of the window that when you stand at it, your glassy reflection looking back at you, the snow blots out the bottom of your face, and you are only eyes. Here's the sink in the bathroom with rust around the drain. This is the shithole room where you live. Every time you walk into it, it slurs, and smudges, and God, you hate it here.

 

Sam stands in the middle of the room after Dad leaves, and sniffs. This whole place smells vaguely like urine and soot. Sam makes a face.

 

“This place is a shithole,” he says, as if he's giving voice to your thoughts, and he turns to you, looking spiteful.

 

This is the shithole end-of-the-world room where you live now, and for the next week, or the next, or maybe three in a row, while your father chases ghosts in the snow. In your twenty-one years you have seen a thousand exactly like this one. You put down the salt lines and Dad is gone and this whole place stinks of exhaustion. The beds are hard and Sam complains of a lump in his pillow he can't quite punch out so you share yours with him, divide it in half with an invisible line, his head on the left, your head on the right. It's only afternoon but you both collapse, anyway, bodies flung out, no covers. Dad won't be back and the salt lines are down and after so long cramped in the car, just like every other trip in the car to every other shithole, after being woken at 4 AM and dragged across two states, you want to sleep, you want to sleep next to your brother, and feel the goosebumps on his bare arm against yours.

 

There's something wrong with this room, with this place, and you know it. It sort of creeps behind your eyes while you lie there feeling Sam's goosebumps on your arm. Creeps in like a smell or a dream. But you don't know what it is, you're too tired to go looking. Maybe the pipes are rattling, maybe the plaster on the ceiling is cracking. Maybe there is dust in the air. At any rate something is curdled up just like that dead spider in the middle of the room and you can feel it going thick over your bare feet on the edge of the bed but it's nothing, probably, just this shithole end-of-the-world motel in these black wet sorry woods, pissing you off. Probably.

 

Sam's breathing puts you to sleep.

* * *

 

This is the room where you wake up. The feeling of something-wrong has dissipated; you dreamed it, maybe. Or else you breathed it in while you slept, and now it's in you.

 

You're not sure why you've thought that.

 

“Wake up, Sammy,” you say, giving his leg a shove. He mumbles, flops over in his sleep, folding up in half. His arm hangs off the bed. All the hairs on it are standing up in the cold.

 

You pick your way to the radiator under the window and stand against it while it warms up. The metal grates pushing into your legs through your jeans, all across your thighs. You sigh and tip your head back while the hot damp air creases through the denim. You'll have bright red grid-marks on your thighs tonight and Sam will run his hands over their bumpiness and make a face.

 

“Wake up, Sammy,” you say again, looking down to check the salt lines.

 

Sam rolls the other way, clutching the pillow around his head as he goes.

 

It's night now and the Shithole is deserted but for one hulking SUV far off in the lot. One stick-like lamppost, and snow swirling under it like dust in the Mojave, or sugar, or salt. How Dad even found this place is a mystery to you. Why he'd think you're safer here than back in Montana in that nice old house with its separate rooms and its working stove is a mystery to you. You can hazard a guess about the 4 AM run—looked like he'd busted up that coven pretty good—came home covered in blood and shouting at you, anyway. But he won't tell you what he's here for now, why this is the place where you've stopped your running, won't tell Sam, either, won't tell you shit, and you're used to that, but it grates on you, it grates in your teeth like sand, like dust in the Mojave.

 

“You're gonna burn yourself,” says Sam, muffled in the pillow, “if you keep standing over there like that.”

 

You say, “No I'm not. Get up, Sammy. Let's get dinner.”

 

The idea of food seems to rouse him a little. You listen to him roll off the bed and hunt, loudly, underneath it for his sweatpants. Your legs are beginning to burn against the radiator; you step back a fraction.

 

You ask him, “Pizza sound okay?”

 

“Is there even pizza  _out_ here in this shithole town?” Sam counters, right back.

 

He pulls on his boots—you can hear that, too—laces them up over the hems of his sweatpants. Looks ridiculous.

 

You hear him sigh a hard, uncomfortable breath.

 

“Don't feel so great,” he says.

 

“Get some food in you,” you reply. “Then you'll feel better.”

 

“Dad's losing his mind,” Sam mutters, traipsing to the door, leaving clumps of wet dirt on the carpet behind him. “Dumping us in a place like this. You know where he's at? Probably? He found the nearest bar, that's where he's at. There's no case here.” Sam kicks the door. “There's no goddamn case here.”

 

He sulks all the way down the freezing corridor to the lobby, the glass-walled blinds-pulled lobby, trailing behind you like a petulant toddler. You hope he'll cheer up when he gets something warm in his belly. Dad is gone and you don't want to waste a night like that.

 

There is a man behind the counter in the lobby and his teeth are like needles.

 

“Hi,” you say, keeping back, near the outside door. Sam lingers behind you. It's a sudden revulsion, one you can't entirely account for, but it feels like a bad mistake to step any further inside. Here will do.

 

“Hello,” says Needle Teeth. “What can I do for you boys?”

 

He looks at Sam, standing behind you, like he wants to eat him.

 

“Is there a pizza joint around here?” you ask. You can feel yourself instinctively shrinking back into your own skin. Sam's jittering from cold like a baby deer behind you, you can feel it. God, this lobby stinks. “Someplace that delivers?”

 

“Oh, no,” says Needle Teeth. “Nothing like that.”

 

“Okay,” you say, feeling nervous in your gut. “Anything that delivers?”

 

“Chinese,” says Needle Teeth. Smooth as anything he reaches up and slides a takeout menu over the counter.

 

“Thanks,” you say, and move forward to snatch it faster than you should, it belies your nerves, but Needle Teeth doesn't seem to notice. He's still looking at Sam like he wants to eat him up.

 

“This place is fucking creepy,” Sam mutters, in a cloud of frozen breath, half-jogging behind you back to the room.

 

You hum the chorus notes of “Hotel California,” and he glares at you.

 

You lock the door, and the deadbolt, and the latch. You nudge the salt back into place with the toe of your boot.

* * *

 

When the takeout boxes are empty, scattered like shrapnel on the table below the snow-caked window, and Sam is lying on his stomach in his boxers on the bed, sleepily watching the fuzzy blue flickering of the TV, you roll up against him, fit your foot into the space between his ankles. He stiffens—shifts—slides his bare leg a little ways up yours and then gently kicks you away.

 

“Not tonight,” he says, apologetically. Gives you a look. “Sorry. I'm tired.”

 

You roll over onto your back, hands on your belly, looking at the angle of his jaw. “Not even a kiss?” you say, in a sing-song voice you know he hates, the voice he says makes you sound like a spoiled brat.

 

Sam rolls his eyes but pushes his mouth against your cheek, quickly, sweetly, and goes back to his television.

 

Not that you can expect anything else from him. You've been fooling around in the years since he turned fifteen but never anything more than kisses, touches. You think, maybe he's scared, of what the next step would do to him, to you. Or maybe he's worried you'll get caught, or that its mark will be indelible, that you'll both be forced to wear it like a badge of shame where everyone can see.

 

You're patient, though. You can wait. You can wait for him.

 

Only now, here, in the Shithole, the kick of your foot away from him almost makes you a little angry. A peppery burn in your chest. You don't like that. You don't know where it's come from. You need a drink of water.

 

You stand under the massive dusty cobweb to sip from the plastic cup you've filled and you look up into it. The dead spider trembles dangerously in the vague draft from the radiator.

 

Sam is feeling restless. You can hear it in him, how he's shifting his legs across the comforter, stretching them out, opening and closing them, cracking his toes.

 

Experimentally, you purse your mouth and blow upwards towards the cobweb, and as if it's been waiting for such a thing to happen it dissolves, and the dead spider drops— _plunk—_ right into your cup, and floats there, like an overturned boat.

 

“Fuck,” you say.

 

Its eight legs are folded in. You are seized with the sudden urge to poke down against its abdomen and open them up, to see the full size of it.

 

But you don't—you go into the bathroom and dump the water out into the toilet and watch the dead spider hurtle down the drain, and then you go back to Sam, and lie down on your stomach next to him, and toy with the hair at the nape of his neck, because you know it annoys him.

 

“You feeling okay now?” you ask, or mumble, into the heel of your hand where it's propping up your head, remembering what he'd said upon waking.

 

“No,” Sam says, and there's something off about it, but you can't decide what it is. “I dunno. I just feel weird.”

 

“Yeah,” you say, feeling the peppery burn still crackling in your chest. “Me too.”

 

Distantly, in the back of your brain, something raises its head and whispers,  _something's wrong here, do you feel it? Could be dangerous._ But you ignore it. You aren't sure why you ignore it. The only thing in your mind is to lie here and play with Sam's hair and annoy him, until maybe he kisses you again, for real this time.

 

On the television long-dead Hollywood stars are tap-dancing across the screen, staticky and fuzzed out, the audio warped. Outside the snow is falling in dredges, in slabs, in tons.

* * *

 

In the morning—if it can be called morning, as dull and sunless as it is—Sam takes a shower with the lights off, and when you wakes up, Sam is sitting naked next to you, picking at a scab on the back of his heel.

 

“No hot water,” Sam says, foregoing a  _good morning_ . “So you should make it quick.”

 

He must have showered cold. You can almost feel the damp chill coming off him. His hair is still wet, hanging in blackish strands over his eyes.

 

“Don't pick at that scab,” you say.

 

Sam ignores you. The little black clot comes off under his fingernail and he hisses. The spot of blood that wells up to replace it is the brightest thing you've seen in this place.

 

He's smiling when you look at him, a weird little smile, like it felt good, maybe.

 

Dad must have come and gone again in the night—one of his bags is on the table, open, spilling. Books you recognise from the hunt in Montana, gilded lettering glimmering a little in the snow-light, kind of eerie—a gallon plastic bag with something in it, something stolen from the coven, you think, vaguely recalling it, something important to your father. Doesn't mean a thing to you.

 

The caulking underneath the windowsill is curdled and yellow and you curl your lip at it.

 

“God, this place is a dump,” you say, lame, as you go in to the shower yourself, with the lights all off.

 

The water's bone-cold but you stand under it anyway, face lifted up into it, eyes closed, trying to think. The not-quite-rightness is all over you, you can feel it, on your skin like a veneer of dirt, and if you think about it it was there last night, too, when the spider fell into your cup, and with Needle Teeth, and between Sam's ankles. But you don't know what it is, and maybe it's not really there, it's just you being spiteful about the Shithole and Dad being gone, and the snow, all the snow. And you have a sort of feeling like someone's lobotomised you, like your brain is too far back in your skull, and even though you try, almost actively, to care about how wrong this room feels, you can't quite muster it.

 

The sound of a bare foot on tile. Through the murky grey curtain there's Sam, standing in the doorway, still bare as the day he was born, and he can't see you through the curtain but he's watching you.

 

You want to snipe at him that he's acting weird, because he is. But you're acting weird, too, and you know that.

 

Maybe it's the snowstorm. That Seasonal Affective Depressive thing. Maybe.

 

You look at his shape through the shower curtain and still. You can almost feel his eyes searching out your movement. You let your hand rest on the concave of your belly, fingertips downward, thinking about the shape of him, the smudge of colour of him, his tongue between his teeth.

 

“Wanna play chess when you're out?” Sam asks, dull. He sounds detached, too, in the way that you feel, like he's speaking from way back in his throat, like his tongue is lying flat in his mouth.

 

“Sure,” you say.

* * *

 

The chessboard is one of those travel-size ones, with the magnetic pieces smaller than the joint of your index finger, and they stick to the board and moving them is a pain in the ass—your fingers tend to knock all the other pieces out of place.

 

Sam makes those moves for you, with his slim brown fingers, when you get frustrated.

 

You play three games and Sam wins two. You go out into the snow, in unlaced boots and jeans and the same winter coats you've both had for four years, to the frozen vending machines near the second-level stairs, and, fumbling change into your cold hands from your pocket, you buy Bugles and cans of soda and that's lunch. The Bugles are stale and Sam's soda explodes all down his front when he opens it halfway back to the room and he snaps “Shit!” so loudly that the hard wind snatches it away from him and hurls it across the parking lot and you can almost hear it bang against the lamppost, that's how deep the echo is, and it freaks you out, a little, the way that sound carries, when you know in your gut that it  _shouldn't_ , but Sam is already stomping back to the vending machine to spend his last quarters on a new can and the anxiety is gone.

 

Sam taps viciously at the top of his can with his fingernail to knock the carbonation down. He taps so hard you almost think he'll puncture the aluminum.

 

You are playing chess still when Dad comes back, empty Coke cans on the floor, the battered takeout boxes letting up a smell from the trash can. Dad steps over the salt line that you neglected to replace and stomps his feet, chunks of ice and snow flying off, bouncing into the corner of the door like bullets. He looks at you both, sitting crosslegged on the floor, Sam's heel nastily scabbing over again; he looks at the trash on the floor; he looks at the unmade bed.

 

Then he sighs, either too tired or too annoyed to lecture you on cleanliness, and drops down into the chair by the Formica table.

 

“I need some peace and quiet,” he says. You see the bag at his feet that he's dropped. The fabric is punched out in angles; it must be full of books. With the brunt of one forearm he sweeps all the witchy-books from Montana into a pile against the wall beneath the window, unimportant now.

 

Sam gets to his feet and starts pulling on his boots.

* * *

 

There is only that one other car in the Shithole's parking lot and the both of you decide to make it your mission to find the single other occupied room while you have been exiled from your own.

 

Sam's green scarf is pulled up over his nose and mouth like he intends to rob someone. His ears are bright red in the wind. When you reach up to tweak one, playfully, it's so cold it burns your fingers.

 

Together you wander, up and down, not talking much, across the bare front of door after door, peering in windows with your numb hands curled around your eyes. Every room is the same. Frigid grey beds, browning watercolours overhead, lampshades splitting from use, quiet televisions. You almost expect to see the same massive cobweb draped in each one, with its own replica spider, waiting to fall at the slightest breath, but in this you are disappointed.

 

The metal stairs to the second story are slick with ice. Sam goes first. Halfway up you chance a look down and see Needle Teeth, the clerk, just outside the lobby door, smoking a cigarette. He looks up at you and does not smile.

 

You and Sam make a game of shoving one another with your shoulders, you stumbling perilously close to the guardrail, and briefly a flash of a thought crosses your mind:  _if I fell right now and broke my neck, Sam would laugh._ You're certain of it, somehow. 

 

You're disgusted to find that, when you think about it, if Sam fell from this second story right now and broke his neck, you'd probably laugh, too.

 

Winter makes people go crazy, you guess.

 

It doesn't take long, up here, to find the other guests. Their curtains are flung wide open and the glare of the lights on inside obliterate the window, like a one-way mirror. You can practically stand in full view and see them.

 

“Sammy,” you say, when you peer inside, “come here.”

 

It's a woman and a man, and they're having sex. And you don't know what it is that keeps you standing there, rooted to the spot, looking in at them, and you don't know what it is that makes you call Sam over to look, too, but you do—nothing about it feels wrong—that same instinctual voice in the back of your head is telling you that  _any other day in any other motel you'd be running away laughing but not here and isn't that strange? Isn't that strange and dangerous? What are you doing?_

 

“Shit,” Sam breathes, pulling the scarf down from his mouth, when he sees. He stands there, too.

 

Their bodies are practically golden in the lamplight. They're graceful, wrapped up in one another, not a care in the world. Her hair is obscuring both her face and his, long and long and brown.

 

It gives you a kind of horrible thrill to stand here and know they can't see you, but you can see them, and when you look at Sam's face his eyes are bright and curious and he doesn't seem perturbed  _at all_ and something in  _that_ is not right, either. This is not a thing that Sam would do.

 

But it's almost a bigger thrill to watch Sam watching them and—

 

You can't hear them through the window, or over the wind; it's almost like gazing through the glass of an aquarium, into deep soft noiseless space, and you wonder if her moans can travel like sonar, if—

 

“Come on,” you say, breathless, “let's go.”

 

But neither of you move.

 

There's something weird about it, this woman pushing her body against this man, slinging her long dark hair over her shoulders, biting her kisses at the edges of his mouth. It's mesmerising—the spaces where their bodies intersect. The slickness of her, around him. He looks—not the way you would expect a man like this to look—like he's way back in his head—like he belongs to her.

 

It's a kinship, you realise. It's the way you feel about Sam, some days.

 

You watch the way her breasts hang, lovely-pale. How the muscles in his thighs are trembling like tight strings.

 

You should look away now.

 

“Let's go,” you say, again. You watch the man's head shift on the pillow and are struck with a sudden shallow knowledge that they know you are there.

 

A sick part of you that you were unaware of before expects Sam to object and linger and keep watching but that's not the way things seem to work in the Shithole, whatever it's doing to you both. Sam licks the frost off his lips and looks at you with bright, emotionless eyes.

 

You keep on walking down the corridor, legs bumping, and around the exposed corner where the trees and the single-file road and the brackish sky stretch off into haze and nothingness, and back around, back towards the stairs, a little hub of corners and ceilings where you're sheltered from the wind.

 

Sam leans back against the wall, away from the cold. He's almost as tall as you, now, the little shit, gaining, if only by an inch or so. He's curling and uncurling his fingers in his jacket pockets; you can see them.

 

“I feel—” he says, casually, vacantly, looking off past your head.

 

“Yeah,” you say, even though you don't have a word for what it is that you feel. It's like moving through a dream, all of this. A dream or water. A projector reel playing behind your eyes.

 

“Hey,” Sam says, a smile appearing on his face, his spine going languid against the wall, his feet sliding out. “You should kiss me. Since I didn't kiss you last night.”

 

“Out here?”

 

“Yeah. Out here.”

 

“People might see,” you say, thinking of Needle Teeth down below, with a sightline through the metal bars of the stairs, and thinking simultaneously that you almost, sort of, kind of,  _want_ people to see. “Dad might see.”

 

“Dad's reading library books and drinking himself to sleep. Come on,” Sam says, “kiss me.”

 

“Out here,” you say, again.

 

His smile tightens and you know he's thinking of the couple in the room with the flung-open curtains, fucking on display.

 

You lean forward to obey and suck a noisy nothing-pretty kiss onto Sam's mouth.

 

Sam turns his head away and spits. His saliva bubbles in the snow.

 

“Do it again,” he says, grinning, like he wants to get up to mischief. He glances down, down through the metal bars of the stairs, and you follow his eyes, and there's Needle Teeth, no cigarette, now, thinking himself surreptitious. You can see his white eyeballs pointed upward toward you both.

 

This time you kiss him gentle and his mouth opens and it's hot and wet and you want to crawl inside it and be warm. You want to crawl inside him and be warm. His eyes are open and he is looking down at Needle Teeth who you can feel is watching you, watching you kiss your brother, you hope he knows that this is your brother, you hope he knows. You bite into Sam's lower lip and pull on it, slowly, easily, so that if Needle Teeth is watching with his Sam-hungry eyes he can see that the only one allowed to eat Sam up is  _you_ .

 

Something seizes in your throat and you don't mean to but your teeth clamp down hard and sudden and you taste blood and Sam pulls back from you with a  _pop_ from his split lip and stares at you.

 

“Sorry,” you say. When you look down Needle Teeth has disappeared.

 

Sam touches the split with his finger and looks at the blood, a dazzling dancing drop of pure red.

 

“Sorry,” you say again. “Here.” You reach up and smudge the blood away.

 

Sam is looking at you like he doesn't really see you. His pupils are kind of dilated, you think. You wonder if you should be concerned.

 

He's not acting like himself right now.

 

“You're not acting like yourself,” you say, though you aren't sure what kind of reply you expect.

 

“You're not, either,” Sam says.

 

“Should we be worried?” you say. You can feel yourself swaying. It's a long way away.

 

“I think so,” says Sam. “But I'm not. I don't know why.”

 

“Me either.”

 

You stand there, looking at each other, and all you can think is that you want to push him up against the wall and kiss him again. You want to bite so hard into his lip that the blood runs down his chin.

 

Together you walk back down the stairs, playing again at the game where you shove one another with your shoulders. Once down on the icy sidewalk Sam pauses and says, matter-of-fact, “Up there I wanted to push you over the guardrail.”

 

Somehow this doesn't frighten or surprise you as much as it should.

 

“Why?”

 

“I thought it would be funny,” Sam says. The honesty on his face is strange.  It's like someone has peeled him open. 

 

He says, “There's something wrong with us.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

Sam looks down at his feet and shuffles them.

 

You say, “Don't tell Dad.”

 

Even though Dad will help you, even though Dad will burn this place to the ground and salt the ashes if he knows how you're feeling in this place, and it could be dangerous not to tell him.

 

“I won't,” says Sam.

 

Back when you were children, very young, out on the plains somewhere, you and he had made a blood pact for something silly that you can no longer remember—you'd pricked your fingers and held them together and forgotten it all the next day. This feels like that. Petty, and taboo.

 

Dad is passed out over the table when you come back in. The pills for insomnia that he takes these days are spilling out of their bottle onto his open books. You play chess on the floor as quietly as you can, and Sam picks the scab off his heel again.

* * *

 

In the dark you and Sam undress for bed, wary of turning on lights in case they might wake Dad, and all you can hear is Sam's fumbling feet on the carpet and his whispers and the rustle of his clothes.

 

Under the covers he rolls up close to you, not an ounce of shame in him, and falls asleep like that and you lie awake, his leg thrown across yours, his breath in your ear.

 

You clench and unclench your fist, digging fingernails into your palms and dragging them out again. Above your head the plaster is dusty and you think how easy it would be to punch a hole in it.

 

You wonder what kind of magic is on this place that is making you feel like this. It's not even a question you ask yourself—you know, somehow, in the same way your body knows to breathe of its own accord, that there's magic here, in this room, or maybe in every room, and it's oppressing you and Sam, picking at your brains. But your mind stops there, every time you edge close to it. It stops at the point where you begin to be afraid of it, and begin to worry, and soothes you back, and your fists are opening and closing, and the squeeze of pain feels good.

 

You've been hypnotised before. It feels a little bit like that.

 

Once, twice, you make a fist with the hand that is trapped beneath Sam's body and beat the mattress with it, too soft to wake him, not hard enough to satisfy you.

 

With a vague kind of curiosity you look around the room, or as much as you can see of it in the dark, and catalogue all the things you could break with your hands.

 

Mirror. Lamps. TV. Plaster. Chair legs. Books, torn in half.

 

The shadow of your father slumped over on the table.

 

Sam stirs, pushes his hips against your leg. His mouth falls open against your neck. You reach up, unclench your fist, touch two fingers to the knob of his spine, and you watch your father sleep.

* * *

 

You play chess again. Sam has flung the curtains wide and everything outside is dark and grey. Dad left before the sun; the snow has piled up so high against the door that you can't even open it.

 

On the table there is a stack of Dad's books and a note sticking out from the cover of the topmost one, a witchy one, from the last hunt, asking the both of you to read through in search of something while he's gone, saying he won't be back until the next morning, saying  _ don't leave the room, it isn't safe _ . 

 

Both of you ignore it.

 

“Check,” Sam says, nudging his queen with his pinkie finger. He hasn't bothered to get dressed, not with Dad gone so long. He's sitting crosslegged on his side of the miniature board in his boxers and a soft T-shirt.

 

The scab on the back of his heel is ugly, and bigger than yesterday.

 

“You shouldn't pick at that scab,” you say, moving your king helplessly to the right. “It won't heal.”

 

“It feels good,” Sam says. “Checkmate.”

 

You sweep the magnetic pieces off onto the carpet to rearrange them for a new game.

 

“Hey.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“Wonder who's doing it to us,” you say; you don't have to clarify what you mean. Almost instinctively you feel that he knows. You watch him move—white pawn forward two. “Wonder what they want.”

 

“Mm,” says Sam.

 

Black knight forward, right. “You're gonna win again.”

 

Sam smiles. A few more moves pass between you.

 

“It's annoying, you winning all the time. No one likes a smug winner.”

 

“No one likes a sore loser, either,” says Sam. His fingers dance in the air over the pieces before they land on his queen and unstick her from the board.

 

“Shit.”

 

“Check,” says Sam.

 

Peppery burn in your chest.

 

“Don't we have anything else to play?” you say, scratching anxiously at the back of your head. You're jumpy, suddenly. The carpet is scratchy under your legs. “Like, something I can win?”

 

“We have cards.”

 

“Fuck cards. I hate cards.” You're practically clawing at the back of your head now, the knuckles of your other hand rolling hard against the floor. Sam is looking at you.

 

“Are you okay?” he asks, though it's pretty clear you're not. You've got an awful feeling like something burrowing in the back of your skull.

 

“See if there's something on TV.”

 

You pick up your king, in both hands, to give them something else to do, while Sam half-crawls across the floor for the remote. The back of his heel is bleeding again. He sits down against the bed and slowly pushes out his foot—scrapes the crack in his skin across the rough carpet—and back—and forth—smearing blood into the fibres—

 

“Stop it. You're tearing up your skin,” you say.

 

“I  _ like  _ it,” says Sam.

 

There's a tiny  _ snap,  _ and he looks at you, and you look down at the miniature king in your hands, no bigger than the joint of your index finger, broken in half.

 

“No more chess,” says Sam, blankly.

* * *

 

Needle Teeth answers when you call the front desk.

 

“What can I do for you boys?” he says, and the word  _ boys  _ grates on you. 

 

“Our door's snowed shut,” you say, standing at the window, looking out at the white parking lot. When you glance back, curled phone wire bouncing across the room, Sam is lying on his side on the bed, hand clutching the pillow, watching you. “We need someone to clear it up so we can get out.”

 

“I'm afraid our regular custodian is gone for the day,” says Needle Teeth, without a hint of sympathy.

 

“You telling me you don't have a goddamn shovel somewhere behind that desk up there?” you growl, irrationally upset. You want to snarl,  _ my brother's starving and we need to get to your shitty vending machines.  _

 

Needle Teeth pauses.

 

“It's not really my job,” he says, sounding irritated.

 

“Your motel is a shithole,” you snap, and hang up.

 

Sam watches you while you fume down at the phone, picking at his lower lip with his thumbnail. You wonder vaguely what it is that's making him pick so much at his own skin.

 

After a moment he rolls over on his back and says, “Come over here and kiss me.”

 

For once, you don't feel like it. “Not now, Sammy.”

 

“You know the other thing?” he says, still looking at you with big, unblinking eyes.

 

“What's that.”

 

“I'd let you fuck me,” Sam says, like it's nothing. When you stare at him he pulls a face, an  _ it's-not-that-big-a-deal  _ face. “Here. I'd let you fuck me here. Maybe in that last town I wouldn't have. But here I'd let you.”

 

“Why?” The window is cold at your shoulder, and the radiator is hot at your knee.

 

“I don't know,” Sam says, looking, for once, inwardly thoughtful. “But I keep thinking about it.”

 

Of all the times for you to not be in the mood. You drop into Dad's chair and all you can offer him is an incredulous, long-suffering sigh.

 

Sam smiles at you, sheepish, and it's the warmest smile you've seen on him since you arrived here, and it relaxes you. “Sorry,” he says.

 

He turns over again, onto his stomach, and you look at the long line of his back. His face is hidden in the crux of his elbows.

 

“Hey,” you say, but he doesn't respond.

 

You get up—you feel loose, languid—you push one knee up onto the bed where he lies and lean down, and he is very still underneath you, and you breathe against the space between his shoulder-blades for a moment, and he doesn't budge, but his eyes are open, you can see them, you can see his fluttering lashes.

 

You kiss his back, and you can almost feel his smile ripple through him, so you kiss him again, and maybe he sort of pushes his ass back against you but you're not focused on that—you kiss the side of his neck, slide your fingers his up spine, let them slip into his long tangled hair and you—

 

“ _ Ah _ ,” Sam says, a kind of stunted noise, and you realise you've yanked his hair—you've pulled his head back, hard, and his Adam's apple is jutting out, and his one visible eye is rolled down towards you and his pink mouth is open.

 

With that same faraway detachment you have felt the last three days you experimentally tug again and he makes the same sound, a kind of hitch in his throat, and then  _ mm,  _ he hums, and closes his eyes, and you let go of his head.

 

“I didn't know you liked that,” you say.

 

Sam grins. “Neither did I.”

 

He turns over, hair all splashed out on the pillow, kind of reaches down to coax your knee between his legs, so you kiss him again, no pushing, just the smallest tangle of your fingers in his hair, and his cold fingertips in the space behind your earlobes where it's sensitive—there's a kind of growl in your stomach that has nothing to do with food and you have to remind yourself of his youngness. He is hot soft brother skin and the longest goddamn eyelashes you have ever seen on a boy, you're so glad he's yours, you're so glad you're the one he's head-over-heels for. He lets you suck at the tip of his tongue and you wonder how much blood there would be if you bit into it—

 

There is a noise and Sam stills, and you forget about biting out his tongue, and let it go—without moving your body you tilt your head, just a little, just enough to look and see—

 

“Hey,” Sam whispers, his kiss-pink mouth barely moving. “Keep going.”

 

“Someone's at the door,” you say, pulling your knee back down the bed.

 

“I know,” Sam says, and when you look back down he's grinning this wicked little grin. “He's at the window. He's watching us.”

 

You are both very still, staring at each other, and you can almost feel his thin ephemeral thoughts like strings of light twining into your head and back out again.

 

Needle Teeth is at the window, peering in. You don't have to look to know. It's an instinct you've learned since you were very small, to feel the presence of a person, to know when there is someone in your space, and he's there. You can almost picture him, wide cueball eyes, sharp teeth.

 

“Okay,” you whisper, and Sam grins, opens his mouth for you, you lean down into it, you close your eyes but you can feel him looking sideways towards where Needle Teeth is standing and you can feel him sliding his hand down his chest like the little tease he is.

 

It makes the growl in your stomach purr louder, knowing that there are eyes on you, and you're tempted to look up, to meet those eyes in the window, like the Fucking Couple had, how they made you know.

 

You don't. But you reach up to pull Sam's hair again and he gives a choked-off noise into your mouth and you hear a clatter against the wall, like a shovel being dropped, and Sam goes off into giggles, weird chattery repetitive noises, and you laugh too, into his neck, and the both of you look toward the window at the shadow of that man stumbling around for his tools.

 

“Mm,” Sam hums, as if satisfied, and closes his eyes.

* * *

 

You aren't expecting it when Dad comes home at three AM, a barreling freight train, stinking of booze with blood on his face. You see the blood as if through a strobe light because as soon as he barges in to the dark quiet room where Sam is sucking lazy hazy kisses against your neck he slams the light on, the way he does to wake you on dangerous nights, hard enough to make you fucking piss yourself.

 

Sam pitches off of you, wiping spit from his mouth, and you snatch a pillow up to cover the bruise you can feel blossoming on your throat, and the both of you sit bolt upright as the light finally settles and Dad comes to a blistering stop in front of you.

 

He doesn't seem to have seen—thank God. Even though your awful bitter brain kind of wants him to have seen his youngest acting like that, all sprawled out on you. No. He just seems angry, typical Dad anger, the kind that rockets around just under his skin, and will go off if you push in the wrong direction.

 

You remember abruptly the unopened books on the table and cast Sam a look that he seems to understand.

 

“We're sorry,” you say, even though you're really not. “We—”

 

“—got distracted,” Sam finishes for you. The way his voice catches and completes your own is like oil meeting oil. You're kind of impressed.

 

Dad doesn't say anything. Maybe he can't. Maybe he's too piss-drunk. Or maybe, you think—with a snatch of wild, sudden glee—maybe whatever he's hunting here tore his tongue out. God, what a blessing that would be.

 

Dad doesn't say anything but he does grip your chin, in a flash, in his fingers, and pulls your face up, and stares at you, hard and unblinking, like he's trying to beam his disappointment straight into your brain. You can feel Sam watching you.

 

“Look at me,” Dad snaps, his words blurry. “Look at me.” You do, and he lets go of your chin, almost as if he's trying to fling you away. You work your jaw, crack its joints. Sam is still watching you.

 

“Do you know why I brought you here?” Dad says, hard, like he's speaking through steel teeth. “Do you?”

 

He does the same to Sam, and Sam's got a look on him like he's liable to snap out at Dad like a rabid dog and take his fingers off, but he doesn't—he sits there looking bowed but annoyed, fists clenched on his knees.

 

“We were being followed,” he snaps, all brimstone and frustration. It makes your hackles rise.  _ “You.  _ From Montana. Do you understand that? And here you are—playing—” He looks down at the floor. “Chess.”

 

He flings Sam's face away, too.

 

“Good for nothing.” He stumbles towards the table where the unopened books still stand and sweeps them off with his arm. They crash to the floor, pages open and spilling, hardbacks cracking. The bag, too. That gallon plastic bag. It thuds. He's so drunk you can almost smell it on him even all the way across the room.

 

“Good for nothing pieces of—”

 

Dad snatches his coat around him and opens the snow-packed door again and slams it shut behind him.

 

For a moment you both sit there, and you look at the books on the floor, and wonder how much trouble you'd get in for tearing them to pieces.

 

You don't need to ask to know how Sam's feeling. Neither of you give a shit about the books, or Montana, what you were meant to have done. Dad's anger feels ludicrous. It's still floating around, like a bad smell.

 

Sam gets up—it's a smooth, almost machine-like movement; he's been moving like that a lot these last few days, you've noticed. He goes into the bathroom, quiet as you please.

 

You sit there, still, looking at your reflection in the blank face of the television, your eyes two holes of shadow.

 

A curiosity catches you—very narrowly—like the scrape of a fingernail, and you get up. Crouch down by the window and the littered books, and the plastic bag-thing, half out of Dad's duffel now.

 

You pull it out with two fingers. Something he'd stolen from that coven—you remember now. They were weird ones, he'd said. Up to no good. Onto his presence in town. You hold the bag up to the light, peer through the gloss of the glare on its surface.

 

Looks like dolls. Two wax dolls.  _ Poppets  _ is the word, you remember. Their hands and heads are painted red. You pick through the plastic, gently, at their faces, feeling the texture of the things embedded in them—hairs, pieces of teeth, bits of fingernail.

 

There is a noise in the bathroom like something falling to the counter-top—and then again. You look up, dropping the bag, and it comes again, a pounding.

 

In two strides you're at the door, looking in, and there's Sam, standing at the porcelain sink, slamming the backs of his hands against its edge. Over and over, as hard as he can. Looking hard into the mirror. Blood smeared on the counterpane. A sound like a fly-swatter hitting marble. His teeth grit in his skull.

 

He makes fists, seems to consider them a minute, and then beats those, too, slams his knuckles down. There's a piece of skin hanging from the back of his right hand. You can see it. His face is the picture of calm.

 

“What are you doing?” you say, over the noise of his hands. It doesn't occur to you to make him stop.

 

But he does stop, then, and holds his hands up, their backs facing the mirror, and he looks at the blood on his knuckles, and the penny-sized circles of skin that he's busted off.

 

Sam rounds back on his heel and drops, onto the edge of the bathtub, as if all the energy has suddenly gone out of him. His legs sprawl out, ankles at odd angles, his bloody bloody hands hanging over his knees.

 

“He's a piece of shit,” Sam says.

 

He twists one leg forward, looks down at the big black ugly scab on his heel. He clenches his jaw and slams it back against the tub, lets out a long, low sigh, head tipping back, eyes closed.

 

“Hey,” he says, slowly, after a minute, and lets his head come back down, and looks at you. “Hey. We should kill him.”

 

You stop, glance to the side—a fly has already landed on the blood on the sink. You're not sure where it came from. You're not sure where anything comes from here.

 

“What?” you say, flat.

 

“We should kill him.”

 

“Why?”

 

Sam shrugs, a lazy movement of his scrawny shoulders.

 

“He's a piece of shit,” he says.

 

“Be something to  _ do, _ ” he says.

 

You go inside, sit down cross-legged on the floor in front of Sam. His breathing is loud but steady. He's swaying a little, on the edge of the tub; you reach up to take one of his busted hands.

 

He lets you manipulate it, feel for broken bones. There are none. That's damn lucky. You hold it, examining the dark red bleeding flesh over his knuckles; he's looking at you; you feel an urge and bow to it, bow your head a little, just enough to press the flat of your tongue to the wound.

 

Sam doesn't move, or say a word.

 

It tastes exactly like blood should taste; you close your eyes, because it feels right, feels good. You feel like a knight in one of those old medieval paintings kneeling at the feet of your king though you suppose it was more kings'  _ feet  _ that knights kissed, and not so much their bleeding hands; but Sam is hot wet salt in your mouth and you like it; you like to think that when you raise your head in the mirror your lips will be the colour of his insides; you curl his finger up with your teeth and take the digit in your mouth and suck and open your eyes again and look at him.

 

Sam doesn't seem surprised, or shocked. He just blinks, like a marionette might, to give the illusion of life.

 

You're thinking,  _ I wouldn't normally do this.  _ But the Shithole is not  _ normally,  _ is it. 

 

You're thinking that the moment to rebuke him for suggesting such a thing is past and there's no point, is there, in going after it.

 

“Okay,” you say, when you let go of his finger, and you expect Sam to grin, but he doesn't. You sit there with him, the both of you staring at his hands.

 

This is the magic, you tell yourself. This is supernatural influence. It's making us do these things. It's making us think these things.

 

Deeper, you think— _ but that's not necessarily true. _

 

But you don't  _ care. _

 

Maybe a marionette is exactly what you are, what Sam is, here, and  _ someone  _ is pulling your strings, but you don't know who—but puppets don't have feelings. You are not Real Boys.

 

Where he struck his heel against the tub there is a smattering of blood. You lick your thumb and reach between his legs and smear it off, away.

* * *

 

You pull back the curtains and look out into the parking lot, and the Impala is gone; the tire tracks in the snow are being gently covered now, by new-falling white, like confetti flakes.

 

Sam is sitting on the bed in his sweatpants with his bleeding heel propped up on the nightstand.

 

It's an awkward place for a bandage but you've bandaged worse. He watches your hands while they smooth the medical tape and the gauze in place over his Achilles tendon. It doesn't take long for a nice red blot to appear on the gauze.

 

“Don't pick at it,” you say. “Okay?”

 

“Okay,” he says. Instead he plucks the piece of dangling skin off the back of his right hand—no bigger than a fingernail, but nasty—he flicks it into the trash can across the room.

 

Anywhere else you'd have wanted to vomit, seeing that. But.

 

“Let me see your hands,” you say, reaching for more gauze from the first-aid kit Dad left behind, and he holds them out. There are still streaks of faint red where he washed the blood away. You'll resist tasting that, for now, you think.

 

He's still while you wrap up his knuckles and when you're done he looks like he's ready for a fistfight. He flexes his hands and watches the gauze crinkle at the crease of his palm.

* * *

 

You are lying, listless, in bed, when the sun rises, cold and clear. It's hardly a light at all.

 

Sam dozed off in the night—his gauzy hand is resting on your thigh. But now when you glance over at him his eyelashes are fluttering and his eyelids are drooping.

 

You've almost forgotten the agreement you made in the bathroom last night until Sam opens his mouth and speaks, and the wooden noise of his voice brings you straight back.

 

“I hate this room,” he says. “Let's go out.” His voice is clear but his eyes are still slipping and sliding, as if any minute he'll drop back into sleep. It's unnerving, or it would be, anywhere else.

 

“Out where?”

 

“Upstairs.”

 

You think about it, and the guardrail, and the high sun cutting through the snow and wind. Abruptly nothing sounds better in the world.

 

“Okay,” you say. “Upstairs.”

 

You sit on the edge of the tub while he showers. The water gets colder the longer he stands there. It comes off him in droplets and hits your back. You watch the space outside the open door and when he's finished he takes your spot and you climb in, and he does the same as you. Just looks.

* * *

 

Upstairs. The steps are just as slick as before and you watch Sam's feet carefully, almost expecting them to slide and for him to fall, to crack his head open on the banister. Brains and blood dripping down the frigid ironwork.

 

“What?” he says, when he catches you grinning.

 

To see the Fucking Couple standing at the head of the stairs does not surprise you. You have a deep backwards feeling that you expected this. Sam does not blink when he sees them. The both of you stop, two steps from the top.

 

They are leaning on the wall, as if they've been waiting for you. The woman with her long brown hair, and the man, who seems small beside her. They have their hands in their pockets.

 

“Hello,” says the Woman. Immediately you think she is the one who does the talking.

 

“Hi,” says Sam. You say nothing—you just look.

 

“Thanks for coming up,” says the Woman.

 

You don't bother to tell her that you weren't invited, that it was just a whim, because it wasn't. You know that, in your marrow.

 

You almost don't mean to speak until you are speaking, and it feels like someone has scraped the back of your tongue with their fingernails until words came up.

 

“You're witches,” you say, more of a statement than anything else.

 

The Woman smiles. The Man's eyes go hooded, and he looks at you, hard.

 

“And you're hunters,” she says.

 

You and Sam exchange glances. It isn't in you to run away from these people. It doesn't seem to be in Sam, either.

 

“Wow-ee,” says the Woman, shrugging her shoulders, her mouth like a knife. “How's your daddy, kids?”

 

“Gone,” you both say, in tandem, though you don't mean to.

 

“Too bad,” she says. She looks at her partner, and they seem to have that same kind of invisible rapport, the kind you have always had with Sam. You look hard for the threads of their thoughts, but you can't see them. “We were just leaving. We thought we'd say goodbye.”

 

“Did you follow us?” Sam asks.

 

“What do you think?” says the Woman.

 

“Your father ruined us,” says the Man. He is not as calm as her, you can feel that.

 

“Have you found our gifts yet?” says the Woman, and the Man immediately shrinks, as if she's yanked on his leash, whatever it is. “Your father has them. He stole them from us. We still think you should have them.”

 

You think of the plastic bag in Dad's duffel, the wax dolls inside. You think of the peppery burn in your chest and Sam's bleeding ankle.

 

“Did you put a spell on us?” you ask. It doesn't occur to you to be anything but straightforward. You realise your foot is still poised on the stair, as if you've frozen in place mid-ascent.

 

The Woman smiles.

 

“You did.”

 

“Only of sorts,” says the Woman. She steps forward, her boot crunching in the ice. She takes your chin in her hand, the way Dad had, last night, but gentler, though her fingers are the coldest things you've ever felt. She looks at you, and Sam is looking at you, too, ready, you can feel, to lash out if she tries to hurt you, to push her over the banister.

 

You think of her lovely-pale breasts. Somehow you feel  _ weaker  _ for having seen them. You've got no power over her.

 

“Have fun, babies,” she says, and lets go of you. “You can do anything you like out here.”

 

The Man follows her down the stairs, and the both of you take the last few steps, lean out over the guardrail, watching them emerge from the stairwell onto the white blank of the parking lot towards their hulking SUV, no bags, just the ends of her scarf trailing in the breeze. You watch them get into their car and drive away, out onto the highway, out of sight.

 

You stand there, hands freezing, Sam at your shoulder.

 

“Dean,” he says.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“If I fell from here and cracked my skull—” He points to the cold, hard sidewalk down below. “How far do you think the blood would go?”

 

You picture it. The SUV is already fading from your mind. You picture his broken stick-figure body in the snow, the splatter of red.

 

“Pretty far,” you say. “Let's go inside.”

* * *

 

It's four AM, and you turn on a lamp, and by its sick light you sit across the bed from Sam and open up a pack of cards. He wants to play War, so you play War—it's mindless, and quick, and ruthless, and just the kind of thing that seems suited to you, the way you are now.

 

Sam wins the first few turns but you win them back in no time. You're pulling cards from your deck so quickly that they're slicing into your fingers as they go, sluicing through calloused skin. It hardly feels like anything.

 

“How should we do it?” asks Sam. Five-three, he wins.

 

“Do what?”

 

“Kill Dad.” Two-king, you win.

 

He knocks his cards back into place. Your eyes land on the bottle of sleeping pills on the table, otherwise empty now, with all the books on the floor.

 

“We could drug him,” you say. It's practical. Four-ace, you win.

 

Sam twists his lip. “That's no fun.” Ten-nine, he wins.

 

“What would be fun?”

 

“He's always smacking you around. I hate it. It's like he thinks he can do whatever he wants, because no one else cares about us. Not in places like this.”

 

“You wanna smack him around?”

 

“ _ No _ ,” Sam says, with tension, queen-six, he wins, “I want to  _ kill _ him.”

 

“We've got knives,” you suggest. “We've got everything.”

 

“We should have fun with it, is what I'm saying.”

 

“If we knocked him out,” you say, six-nine, you win, “we'd have time to do whatever we wanted. You know?”

 

“Yeah,” says Sam. “That's what I mean.”

 

Two sevens. War. One-two-three, jack-four, he wins.

 

“Shit.”

 

He gathers up the cards with his tongue between his teeth.

 

“We could take turns with him,” he says.

 

“And do what?”

 

“I don't know. Make him hurt.” Sam growls low in his throat when you sweep his card into your deck. It makes the hair go up on your arms and your stomach go hot. “I just really wanna make him hurt.”

 

The idea is electric in your mouth. “Yeah,” you say, “me too.”

 

You think about it. You don't hate your father. Sam doesn't either, you know that. But that doesn't seem to matter. Big shadow-man completely at your whim. For every time he'd busted you up or called Sam worthless. For your broken nose last fall. All of it. The idea's planted. Too sunk to pull out.

 

“Hey.”

 

Two-ten, you win.

 

“Yeah?”

 

“You think this is it?” You need to slow your draw down; you can feel parallel rows of paper-cuts on the inside of your fingers, but the sting is so  _ nice.  _

 

“What?”

 

“Maybe they  _ want _ us to hurt Dad,” you say. You mean the Fucking Couple, and he knows it. Nine-queen, you win. “I mean, he killed their coven. That's how it worked out.”

 

“Okay,” says Sam.

 

“And we're gonna do it. We're gonna give them what they want.”

 

“They did a good job,” Sam says, his eyes heavy-lidded.

 

“I know.”

 

“War,” says Sam, pointing to the pair of fours you've both put down.

 

One-two-three, six-five, you win.

 

“If we took turns,” says Sam, “you know. How would it go?”

 

“I don't know.”

 

“Well, tell me.”

 

“We have knives,” you say again. You look towards the bottle, and past the bottle, to the windowsill. “And salt. Salt hurts, in open wounds. I mean, we know that.” Six-jack, he wins. “If we knocked him out—if we had him laid out, like that—I mean, we could cut him all we wanted—a million little cuts, if we wanted—and salt—” Three-ace, he wins. “We could strangle him—you'd like that.”

 

Sam bites down into his lower lip.

 

“And we could—hell, we could burn him. Like, cigarette burns, you know? Those hurt like hell.” Four-four, war, one-two-three, two-eight, you win. “I think we've got a crowbar in the trunk. Yeah? Could use it on his face. His teeth?”

 

Two kings.

 

One-two-three; two kings.

 

“Sammy,” you say, waiting for his play, but when you look up he's sucking his lip between his teeth and trying to keep his eyelids steady.

 

Slowly his hand drags across his king, he picks it up, looks at it.

 

“Oh,” you say, seeing it, now, the flush on his face—the soft roundness between his legs. “Oh-ho, shit.”

 

“Shut up,” Sam says, and tears his king in half.

 

You can't even be upset that the game is ruined. “That turns you on,” you say. “Thinking about it.”

 

“Shut up,” Sam says, more of a squeak, now, but his hand slides down between his legs and palms at himself, and he covers his face with the other.

 

“Makes you hard?” you say, suddenly and irrationally obsessed, pressing your knees into the discarded game and leaning forward toward him. “Killing Dad?”

 

“Only with you,” he mumbles, and you want to kiss him, but you also want to watch, his bleeding knuckles oozing through the gauze and his slender fingers pushing down between his legs.

 

He peeks at you through his fingers, his lower lip trembling between his teeth.

 

“Don't stop on my account,” you say, more fascinated than turned-on, of course your new strange marionette-brain is cooing at you to fuck him while you can, but there's the other part, the part that thinks,  _ murder, of all things, Jesus Christ.  _

 

“We could break his teeth with the crowbar, yeah,” you say, picking up right where you left off, and Sam covers his eyes again, squeezes himself. “Cut his tongue out too, if you wanted. Or his eyes. Shit, we could cut off everything.”

 

Sam curls forward, hand slipping, fingers finding their way into his mouth. You feel a thrill pass up your spine, lean closer, almost face-to-face.

 

“And we wouldn't want to go too fast—because like you said, that's not fun.”

 

Sam shakes his head, makes a soft sound, pulls his fingers from his mouth and holds them out to you, and shit. You won't say no to that.

 

His blood is leaching into the gauze, capillary action, so you can taste it, damp and cool, when you suck his two, three fingers into your mouth, scrape them with your teeth, he hooks them against your lower jaw and pulls you up close to him, and it's like you can see the flat expanse of the lenses behind his eyes, that's all there is, his insides are pushed up close behind his face, you're sure you look just the same. The both of you, look at you, in the room where you live, mindless, aroused, full of horrible thoughts, and Sammy all covered in scabs—if he let you, you'd pick those off him, one by one, open the gouge in his heel and mouth at it like a slice of aching fruit.

 

You need him to taste his own old blood on his tongue so you let his fingers go, kiss him, drag your hand up into his hair and yank,  _ yank,  _ harder than earlier, hard enough to make his face scrunch up in pain until it dissolves into freakish giddy laughter instead, he makes a warbling noise of happiness in his throat and you  _ yank  _ again—when you let go he bites down so hard on your bottom lip with all his front teeth, his eyes flashing and his grin spectacular, that blood rushes into both your mouths, you gasp, he pulls away, you spit your blood onto his tongue and he comes just like that. Like nothing.

 

You're dripping red down your chin and your shirt and his fingers are wet and his eyes are glazed over and you've forgotten where you'd left off in the story about killing Dad but it doesn't matter so much anymore.

 

Sam sags, eyes rolling, and tips his head back.

 

“Let's keep his teeth,” he mumbles, so low it's like he's almost on the edge of sleep. “Let's keep his teeth in a bag.”

 

“Okay,” you say.

 

Thirty-two little white things in the palm of your hand. You love the idea.

 

“Hey,” you say, remembering, and you roll off the bed, and you feel his eyes following you, and you reach down for the wax dolls in their plastic bag and hold them out to him.

 

“What are those?”

 

“Poppets.”

 

“Poppets?”

 

“From the witches. From Montana. Hey,” you say, “do you think this is what she meant?”

 

“Who?”

 

“The Woman.”

 

“Maybe.” He scratches at his head. He seems bored, now, bored and spent.

 

You open the bag, gently, just enough to pull one out. It's got green pins for eyes. Pieces of shattered tooth stuck into its face, a grotesque imitation of a mouth. Its hands and head are painted red. It chips off under your fingernail the way that blood does. You wonder whose blood it is. You think of Sam's blood.

 

“Break it,” says Sam, breathlessly. “See what happens.”

 

You think of your broken chess piece, Sam's ripped-up playing card.

 

You grip the poppet at each end and snap it in half. The wax comes apart softly, easily. You squeeze the head in your hand and the sharp yellowing bits of teeth bite into your palm. It hurts; you squeeze harder.

 

You pause. You wait for something.

 

Something bigger than the soft sticky wax in your hand, smears of red on your skin, the hum of the radiator, the hum of Sam's breath, you, in this room, standing. It should be here.

 

You exhale.

 

“I don't feel any different,” you say, you whisper, and Sam nods, like he knows; but this time there is a soft feeling of fear, fear of what that means.

 

You open your hand and bits of teeth fall out.

* * *

 

For the first time in this place there is a kind of real anticipation in the room where you live. You and Sam, sitting on the edge of the bed, faces towards the window, waiting for the sun, waiting for your father.

 

More and more you feel that this is the right idea, in some way. Already the agitation is seeping out of you as if it knows it's going to find release soon. And Sam isn't picking at his skin anymore—he's just watching, eyes bright and alert.

 

There enters into your mind a thought—that when you're done with Dad you're going to fuck Sam so hard he can barely stand, on this bed, right here, so that when he turns his head he'll see Dad's body watching you,  _ God.  _ He's never been more beautiful to you than when he was touching himself to the thought of capital murder. Nothing sounds more perfect.

 

The bottle of your father's sleeping pills is sitting in the middle of the table, directly in front of you, like a still-life ready to be painted.

 

“When we're done,” Sam says—or whispers—“where are we gonna go?”

 

“Anywhere,” you say. “Anywhere that ain't here.”

 

You know his next question is  _ what will we do,  _ but he doesn't ask it, because he knows you don't have an answer, and you don't. It feels, to you, as if the world does not exist outside this motel. Nothing is bigger than this motel. The road at the far side of the parking lot feels like the end of the world to you.

 

“Sun's coming up,” Sam says, and it is, but only bleakly.

* * *

 

You see the lights coming in the dawn-darkness, the headlights rounding into the space where Dad parks, and you move like shadows, and as you go towards the door you catch your hand on the huge lamp by the bed and pull it from its socket. Your heart is not pounding as you had expected. In the very back of your mind there is an undercurrent of doubt, and undercurrent of fear of Sam's spidery silhouette in the blank window light, but it isn't strong yet, it's not back to you fully yet. You broke the wax and it broke something in you but it didn't break enough.

 

And the doll in the shape of Sam is still lying on the floor, studded in fingernails. Vicious.

 

Dad's key turns in the lock. You are holding the lamp in your hands. Sam is looking at you from the other side of the door, his eyes a smear of colour in the dimness, looking at you, almost beastly, ravenous.

 

The door opens. Dad's bulk moves inside. Sam gives a wild whoop like it's Cowboys and Indians and you raise the lamp and smash it over your father's skull.

* * *

 

He is lying face-down on the floor when you go outside. Together you open the Impala's trunk against the brunt of the wind and dig down beneath the false bottom. You hand him his crowbar, a Bowie knife, newly-sharpened. For yourself you take the machete Dad gave you on your seventeenth birthday, a canister of salt.

 

You cannot think about this. You know that Sam isn't thinking, either. It's a job, now. The mass of man on the floor is not your father at this moment.

 

You each grip an arm and drag him into the room, and Sam shuts the door behind his slack feet in their boots, dragging ice across the carpet.

 

Hauling him up is hard, but you manage. Together your prop him up, like a broken doll, against the foot of the bed. His head hangs limp. In the early-morning light you can't even see his face but for the shadows in his eye sockets. Now you're trembling, but it's anticipation, it's excitement, even though your conscience is slowly starting to flood back into you like adrenaline. You're pushing it down, you're trying to own it, you're trying to see, this is something you want, doll or no doll, this is something you are doing with your brother, this is something—

 

Sam hefts the crowbar in his hand like a batter at the plate. He looks down at your father, and then to you, and then to the poppet on the floor, in his crude waxen likeness, red hands, red head.

 

He hesitates. He seems to freeze inwardly. You watch him, feeling the grip of your machete growing slick with your sweat. He steps over your father's outspread legs as if they are not there, and for a minute, they're not—you could almost forget about him, about all of this, if it weren't for the shaking of your hands and legs. You need to get a blade in something. It's got to happen. The poppet is gone and you still want it. It has to happen.

 

Sam bends down and picks up the doll, looks at it—tilts it backward to see it in the dawn light. Then he sets it on the table, bites his lip, unsheathes his knife and cuts the thing in half, smooth as if he's slicing butter.

 

You watch it come apart around his blade. He stands there, looking down at it. The oppression has lifted from the room, very suddenly, but your throat is still sticking, you can still feel it  _ in  _ you, it's still  _ there,  _ where it matters.

 

Sam looks at you. His eyes are less dead than they were before, but his mouth is still a hard line.

 

“I don't feel anything,” he says, the crowbar dangling at his side.

 

“It's okay,” you say. There is a calm in you. You don't know where it came from but you welcome it. It's going to happen. Dolls or no dolls. It's sunk too deep, much too deep in you now. “It's okay. Come over here.”

 

He obeys, stepping over your father's legs again, and stands beside you, and you look down at him, lolling busted man, limp hands, boots pointed to the ceiling, helpless. You've never seen him so helpless. It thrills you and disgusts you.

 

It's almost worse, the magic gone. It's almost more urgent, more real, more human, the urge. You look at your brother's face and you know it's the same in him. His lip is twitching. His eyes are bright, like he's going to cry, but he won't, you know he won't, he'll take a swing before he cries.

 

“I want to,” he whispers. He lifts his crowbar an inch into the air.

 

“Me too,” you whisper back. You take a deep breath. This calm is so—unexpected. There is wax on the heel of your boot.

 

Sam hisses breath between his teeth, and his eyes sharpen on your unconscious father, and you feel your arm move your blade, like a machine that is too much a part of you, and Sam reaches out to you; and your little fingers tangle up, like children swearing oaths to one another.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
